Tag: northern lights

So many of us have the eclipse on our minds, but nature has many cards. Tonight (Aug. 16) and tomorrow, night it’s expected to deal the aurora card with minor (G1) geomagnetic storms forecast. A high-speed flow of particles from a coronal hole slamming into a slower stream compresses the material and creates a shock… Read More

A jumbo-sized coronal hole in the sun’s atmosphere showered the Earth with the high-speed plasma (a soup of electrons and protons) earlier this week. The gift is arriving today and tonight and expected to ignite the northern lights to the tune of a G2 or moderate storm during afternoon hours for the Americas. Tonight’s forecast calls… Read More

** Update 10:30 p.m. CDT: After a day with lots of auroral activity in the eastern hemisphere, we’ve been in a lull the past few hours now that darkness has come to North America. No aurora to report yet, but it’s only just getting dark here. I’ll update again in a bit. ** Update 1:15… Read More

After a few days of all show and no action, that big, scenic sunspot group let loose a powerful M-class flare early yesterday evening. The blast sent a giant cloud of solar plasma — electrons and protons bundled with magnetic energy — in Earth’s direction that’s expected to arrive Sunday (July 16) around lunch time and… Read More

With the moon filling out these nights, seeing northern lights gets harder. Last night, there was a chance of a small storm starting around 1 a.m. (Central time). I happened to be out on a gravel road looking up faint supernovae in the telescope. When I first arrived at this wonderful bit of nowhere around… Read More